Remarketing

Ways to remarket

Standard remarketing: Show ads to your past visitors as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps.

Dynamic remarketing: Show dynamic ads to past visitors with products and services they viewed on your website as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps.

Remarketing for mobile apps: Show ads to people who have used your mobile app or mobile website as they use other mobile apps or browse other mobile websites.

Remarketing lists for search ads: Show ads to your past visitors as they do follow on searches for what they need on Google, after leaving your website.

Video remarketing: Show ads to people who have interacted with your videos or YouTube channel as they use YouTube and browse Display Network videos, websites, and apps.

How remarketing works

There are 3 steps1. Add the remarketing tag to your site
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple a Javascript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web.

Here’s how it works: you place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.

Get your remarketing tag code
If you didn’t get the tag code via email when you set your remarketing campaign, you can still find it in your AdWords account. Just follow these steps:
1. Sign in to AdWords at https://adwords.google.com.
2. Go to your “Shared library.”
3. In the “Audiences” section, go to the “Remarketing tag” box at the top.
4. Click the View tag details button and then click Setup.
5. Click View remarketing tag and instructions to get the remarketing code you’ll need to add to your site. If you use Google Analytics, you’ll have the option to use the tracking code that’s already on your site instead.

2. Create remarketing lists
Once you’ve added the remarketing tag to your site, you can create remarketing lists for any of your webpages. For example, you could create a remarketing list for visitors to your most popular product category. The remarketing tag tells AdWords to save visitors to your “Popular category list.” When people visit that page, their cookie id is added to the remarketing list.

3. Build remarketing campaigns that use your lists
Then build an AdWords campaign with a specific message to show only to people on your “Popular category list” while they search on Google or browse other Display Network sites. Your remarketing messages won’t be shown to people who aren’t on the list.

Because the remarketing tag is on all of the pages of your website, you can develop more detailed audiences. For example, you could create lists not only for your most popular product category, but also for each of your other product categories or your shopping cart.

Once you’ve created a remarketing list, create a new campaign and add your list to an ad group. If you add more than one remarketing list to an ad group, the ad group will target all of these lists.

To use remarketing on the Display Network, create campaigns for your remarketing lists by selecting “Display Network only – Remarketing” as your campaign type. The default settings in this campaign type can help you achieve better performance by keeping your targeting broad enough but focused on the right audience.

To use remarketing lists for search ads, you might want to select “Search Network only – All features” as your campaign type.
If you create a new remarketing campaign, you’ll find an “All visitors” list that we’ve created for you, that you can add to your ad group.

Some things to keep in mind

• Multiple ad groups or campaigns can target the same remarketing list. If more than one of your ads targets the same remarketing list, each of those ads are eligible to show.
• If a visitor is on more than one of your remarketing lists, each of the ads included in the remarketing campaigns for those lists are eligible to show.
• In both cases, AdWords chooses the ad with the highest ad rank to compete in the ad auction.

When Does Retargeting Work?

Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool, but it works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy.

Retargeting works best in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing or demand generation. Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization. Conversely, retargeting can help increase conversions, but it can’t drive people to your site. Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and retargeting to get the most out of that traffic.